Business Process Management

What is Business Process Management?

Business process management is the methodology used by businesses to improve end-to-end business processes. Typically, it begins by defining the steps in a process, improving on those that add value, and consolidating or eliminating others, then optimizing electronic workflows to match the process definitions. Business process management aims to improve process agility, operational excellence, and cost efficiency.

Business process automation is part of Business Process Management. Simply put, is the automation of business processes. Business process automation is a quick way to automate simple or complex processes.

Do we need Business Process Managment?

Cost containment and cash flow optimization are at the top of the priority list for most small to mid-size businesses today. Key to optimizing these priorities is effectively automating and then actively managing your most basic business processes.

Business Process Automation forces you to define your processes, which helps you understand your business better.  This provides you with the opportunity to make improvements and better control organizational costs and cycle times.

Every business generally has two primary groups of processes they could automate:

• Standard business processes: human resources hiring and termination, filing expense reports, making sales calls, customer service, and help desk support.
• Industry specific: insurance companies process claims, hospitals access healthcare records, banks process credit applications, and the government processes all kinds of forms daily.

In both cases, such activities are often manual, repetitive, and costly by way of time and employee resources. This is the biggest clue for your need for business process automation.

Here is a checklist of other common small to mid-size businesses scenarios that indicate a need for business process automation. The more of these you have, the greater your potential benefit in automating key business processes.

• Do your employees manually process routine procedures? Lots of them? If “yes,” this represents an ideal place to see the benefits of business process automation.
• Do your employees spend more than a third of their time doing repetitive or administrative tasks? If you’re inclined to answer "no,” check again. As business precautions and notification steps get added to such tasks, it’s not uncommon for processes that previously were lean and focused to grow into a bloated series of steps. Many of these repetitive steps can be automated, and many administrative tasks can be automated to eliminate the manual steps involved.
• Would losing particular employees or managers, who are key to specific processes, negatively affect the company or reduce performance in their department or business unit? Businesses often overlook this factor because they believe “What that person does can’t be automated.” In virtually all cases, this is simply not true. Take a closer look and you’ll see that most people-driven manual processes can indeed be automated, and that once such processes are automated, your company’s risk of personnel loss is much lower.
• Is your workforce spread across multiple locations? With offices in multiple locations, it can be easy for employees in separate offices to fall into their own ways of doing things. Not only is this inefficient, but it also contributes to inconsistencies in information and data flow. Business process automation solves this problem by standardizing the workflow making for consistent results.
• Do executives, managers and supervisors have little or no visibility into work status, relying instead on occasional “status reports” to make important management decisions? Business process automation provides live, concrete, up-to-the-second status information to improve business decisions. As importantly, detailed historical reporting provides a complete review of past performance to reveal areas for improvement as well as future trends.
• Do your current processes require employees to “pull” work to be completed? With business process automation, work is “pushed” to an employee, eliminating the delays that stem from a worker having to track down the next piece of work.
• Must employees navigate between communications systems, business systems and business applications to complete their work? Business process automation acts as an umbrella over other systems and apps, giving employees a single environment in which to manage the entire workflow.
• Does your industry strongly require regulatory compliance, IT governance and security? Industries such as health care, insurance and financial services find that business process automation automatically documents the Who, What, When, , Why and Where in their processes for compliance reporting and associated governance and security.

So then the question becomes, if you might benefit from automating your business processes, where do you start?

Get started by learning more about how Agility BPM™ can work for you!

• Check out our online information
• Call or email us - 402-391-9200 or sales@qat.com